Mehmet Can Altın is a Dual Career PhD fellow at UNU-MERIT and a researcher at the Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey (TEPAV) in Ankara.
His doctoral research examines how firms in middle-income economies accumulate technological capabilities and upgrade within global value chains, and how geography, infrastructure, and industrial policy shape these processes. The project will draw on firm-level administrative microdata from Turkish manufacturing and combine spatial econometrics, production network analysis, and agent-based modelling to trace how knowledge, shocks, and supplier-client linkages travel across firms and regions.
At TEPAV he works on trade corridors and industrial transformation, including a GIS-based multimodal routing model of the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, a firm-level assessment of exposure to the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism in the iron, steel, and aluminium industries, and place-based diversification analysis for lagging regions in eastern Türkiye. Before that he was a research fellow at METU's Center for Solar Energy Research and Applications, where he mapped the value chains and adoption barriers of building-integrated photovoltaics, and he practised as an urban planner on master and conservation plans across Türkiye. He holds a Master's degree in Economics and a Bachelor's degree in City and Regional Planning, both from Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara.